Death Panels

About one-year ago, Gov. Jerry Brown signed the state’s assisted-suicide bill into law....

Now, one young mother says her insurance company denied her coverage for chemotherapy treatment after originally agreeing to provide the fiscal support for it, but indicated it would be willing to pay for assisted suicide instead.

At some point, we're going to have to grapple with the idea that the government -- or, to be more sophisticated, this alliance of government and for-profit companies -- is evil by all traditional measures. Do we go along with the new ideas, redefining the good as if it were a matter of convention? Or do we deal with the government as harshly as we would with a genuine evil?

It's a serious philosophical question, one going back to Protagoras and Socrates. Is man the measure of all things, or is there some god whose opinion rules? Even if the god is "Nature," you still get a kind of telos in which pursuit of life is the good: after all, all things that can pursue their own survival, and their own furtherance through reproduction. So, even if we reason from the squirrels and the trees of the forest, we get to this idea that life is the good.

10 comments:

I remember the vile commentary about Sarah Palin's decision NOT to abort her child that had been diagnosed with Down syndrome. This is no surprise to me, at all.

The next step will be the denial of medical treatment to infants with a designated set of defects.

This is only one reason why we do not want a single-payor insurance system. If we have multiple insurers, we at least have the chance to put some market pressure on the companies to make fewer immoral decisions, rather than relying on government officials, who will have one position when they talk to us, and another position when they talk to the insurance companies and legislators.

Speaking of Sarah Palin, she invented the name "death panels." She was treated as a total idiot who didn't understand the system at all. Of course, she was always right that this is where it would lead.

Palin was the target of the most sickening, disgusting , completely false attacks I have ever seen in the US political spectrum. I have voted for Democrats in the past, in many positions from county to President. The attacks on Palin, and the excrescence of obamacare, have put me in a moral position of never, ever, voting for a democrat again, in any position, as their mere party allegiance places them in a suspect position. Their party is a sinkhole of filth and depravity. Palin also proved, without a shadow of doubt, the entire "feminist" movement is a lie, and a smokescreen for leftist hate.

There are ways to put "pressure " on a single payer system. They are not nice.

At some point, we're going to have to grapple with the idea that the government -- or, to be more sophisticated, this alliance of government and for-profit companies -- is evil by all traditional measures.

I long ago lost any shred of patience I had for people who kept talking about the Left or enemies of humanity having "good intentions", as demonstrated by the "proof" in 2007, that their "neighbors" were "good people" who were "law abiding".

My counter was that a Leftist zombie obeys Authority, and if that Authority tells them to kill you and eat your corpse for the GLory of Utopia, that is their Law. If they tell them the Law is not to litter and break into restrooms as transgender raiders, that is the Law they obey.

Those who Obey Authority, are only as good or evil as that Authority. And the authority and hierarchy of the Leftist alliance as well as their Islamic Jihad allies can best be summed up as "evil" or literally as loyal to Lucifer/Satan.

But telling humans this is a waste of time, as it was in 2007, 2012. It's better if they experience evil first hand, which is why it is always better for me to have the Left teach them that what I write/claim is true. Merely trying to justify my statements makes me the same as every other talking head online and offline. But for those that speak the truth and despise deceptions... well, if that is so, then there is no need to prove it to the glory and acclaim of the public. The world will do so soon enough.

People always talked about having faith in Jesus Christ, which I never understood on a rational level. But having faith in a prophecy that happens to come true, now that I have come to understand quite well.

As I was going through VoxDay's archives some time ago, I've realized that he and some of his original commenters, were part of the Libertarian wing that was allied with the REpublicans in 2006-2008, which was at best neutral on Palin. And often defended her against the Democrats, using conservative logic.

That didn't work, of course, and combined with many other things, made VoxDay give up on the American experiment, adopt White Christian Nationalism and the AltRight's version of eugenics.

I can understand him better now, especially his support of Trum, safe overseas in Italy, in his "burn it down" ideological rhetoric. After all, I began seeing what was behind the curtain of the US in about the same time as well. The difference is that my predictions did not come from statistics or even logical argument, while VoxDay is a specialist in data analysis and computing. That goes into the same vein as the Vdare's version of Epigenetics, which is not the same as my theory of epigenetics from 2008-2011 of course.

As I previously mentioned, understanding someone online doesn't mean people get along better. Sometimes true comprehension merely increases the incompatibility or enmity.

It's a serious philosophical question, one going back to Protagoras and Socrates. Is man the measure of all things, or is there some god whose opinion rules? Even if the god is "Nature," you still get a kind of telos in which pursuit of life is the good: after all, all things that can pursue their own survival, and their own furtherance through reproduction. So, even if we reason from the squirrels and the trees of the forest, we get to this idea that life is the good.

Supposedly God has a plan for new born vessels on Earth, giving them as a reward to the faithful angels and spirits which had followed God's plan against Lucifer/Satan in the War in Heaven. Thus if Lucifer is blocking the entrance of new souls to earthly vessels, that is because Lucifer already has a strategic advantage in souls or do not wish for God to receive further reinforcements. For whatever reasons, the test on Earth strengthens a soul for evil or good. And the eternal War of good and evil, now becomes a matter of the soul, not of armies. No matter how many human armies win over "evil", evil is not wiped out entirely. It always resurrects and revives itself somewhere, somehow. Thus by logical conclusion, evil is not an existence which is on the same level as the existence of human armies. It's more like a board of Go.

If a person follows God, or rather Jesus Christ the mortal avatar of God on Earth to lead the fallen sheep, then all other chains of authority and hierarchies are rendered null and void. If Jesus is your Lord, meaning your liege, then your orders only come from him, no other human can counter or supersede that authority/ranking.

The question of theology becomes the question of why pursuit of life is good, other than inherent instinct and pleasures. The answer usually devolves to "God's will". As human comprehension is insufficient to parse out the divine, there are a limited number of methods to reach an accurate conclusion as to what is this proto entity called God's Will.

Lucifer's will, however, is significantly easier to parse and deconstruct. Since Lucifer, at least, is said to have human emotions, but emotions which most people would easily be able to comprehend. Envy, cruelty, jealousy, pettiness, megalomania, etc. As humans, we may not reach the 4th+ dimension that the divine occupies, in part or in whole, but as humans with human emotions we can understand the motivations of divine level entities if they have human emotions like love or hate.

If I was running Lucifer's command chain and I had set Planned Profit to kill as many incoming newborns as possible, while increasing the population growth in the third world hell holes that are occupied by child rape, child prostitution, starvation, child soldiers drugged for war, suicide bombers, and megalomaniac warlords, what would I be using this for on a strategic level? It's not hard to interpret once the dots are set up in that fashion.

One thing about Socrates that is almost never mentioned is that while he gave many reasons for accepting his death, such as legal or philosophical ones, the strongest one he had for himself was the voice of his personal oracle. Meaning, the same kind of thing Christians testify as to having under the Holy Spirit/Ghost or Jean De Arc spoke of. Even to Christians, the idea that Socrates was a pagan is the orthodox, but someone who hears the voice of God and obeys those commands and guidance even unto death, is more similar to human martyrs like Paul/Jean than Christians of the modern day.

I agree both issues - whether the government/corporation axis is evil and whether there is a measure of good that stands outside what humans want/think/believe at a particular moment in a particular circumstance - are important ones. However, it is not clear to me that this particular case as detailed more fully in the Washington Times article raises them.

The implication in the word "indicated" obscures the fact that the discussion about suicide pills being covered arose because Ms. Packer "asked whether suicide pills were covered under her plan." Further, the story says that Ms. Packer "called her insurance company to find out why her coverage had been denied." The article does not report on the company's response.

This is - or should be - a contract question. Does Ms. Packer's contract with her insurance company provide for provision of the treatment she and her doctor want or not? Further, the financial incentive for insurance companies to deny expensive treatment has always existed; the right to die law did not create those incentives. Hospice/palliative care is almost certain to be cheaper than chemotherapy.

Near the end of the Washington Times article, Ms. Packer makes a claim about the psychological and emotional impact the right to die law is having on terminally ill patients. That, I think, is a very valid concern. When society tells people, especially through the law, that suicide is a viable (perhaps even desirable) option, the message sinks in. It seems to me that we are at the beginning of the same slippery slope we stood on with abortion decades ago. Death With Dignity should be safe, legal, and rare - but making it both safe and legal means it is unlikely to remain rare. This appears to me to be the basis on which a discussion about what is good and what is evil can take place.

This is, though, what we were talking about in terms of "Death Panels." Someone is making a call: "We won't pay for you to try to live, that's too expensive and you're not worth that. We will, however, pay for you to die."

There's always a grave danger when you start setting actual prices on human lives. How much greater a danger when we start saying that we will pay a certain amount of money to make a problematic life go away?

But we've been saying the first half of that - at least the part about it's too expensive to pay for you to live - for as long as there have been health insurance and hideously expensive treatments (especially long-shot ones). An insurance company would not be willing to pay big bucks for a treatment unlikely to save (or extend) a life but would be willing to spend for end-of-life care (whether we call it that or not).

And I don't think it's the insurance company saying "You're not worth that". I think it's the insurance company saying "If we pay for this then premiums will go up and some people won't be able to afford to buy health insurance and then other people - who would have had a good chance to live if they could get care - will die." Or it's other policyholders saying, "Your life is not worth my paying an extra hundred dollars a month in premiums." (See Megan McArdle for an interesting discussion of why we feel health care is somehow a different sort of "good".)

I sort of get your point about setting the price we are willing to pay to kill someone but I think the price-setting is the least of it. Once we've said that some people killing themselves is the right thing to do, we're already in trouble. And once we've said it's even more right for those people to enlist others to help them do it, well, setting a price has to happen. *Somebody* has to pay those other people. Folding this whole concept into business as usual is a skin-crawling thing but that's really just an inevitable consequence of the real problem.